Now, when a tech company sends high-priced hardware to a working journalist, there’s an expectation — actually, usually a demand — that the item be returned when the review period is over. But not in this case. According to several bloggers who got the units, Microsoft basically said they could keep it if they liked. For example, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch received an e-mail that said, in part:

This would be a review machine, so I’d love to hear your opinion on the machine and OS. Full disclosure, while I hope you will blog about your experience with the pc, you don’t have to. Also, you are welcome to send the machine back to us after you are done playing with it, or you can give it away to your community, or you can hold onto it for as long as you’d like. Just let me know what you plan to do with it when the time comes. And if you run into any problems let me know. A few of the drivers aren’t quite final, but are very close.

This is different from the way Microsoft handled similar shipments of hardware to journalists.

Shortly after the release of the Beta 2, Microsoft sent me an HP Pavilion dv9000 notebook, pre-loaded with that version of Vista. I’d been having problems installing it on a notebook PC, and this gave me a chance to see what it was like on a portable. It was clear that this was not mine to keep — in fact, has “Property of Microsoft” stickers all over it and its accessories. Even a 1-gigabyte flash drive for use with ReadyBoost that came with the notebook is stickered! (I gave the notebook a brief review in my Dec. 12 geek-gifts column.)

After news of the giveaway hit the Net, Microsoft backpedaled, saying it might be better if the notebooks were returned or given away when the bloggers were finished with them. Marshall Kirkpatrick, director of content at SplashCast, shared his “don’t keep it” e-mail:

No good deed goes unpunished, right? You may have seen that other bloggers got review machines as well. Some of that coverage was not factual. As you write your review I just wanted to emphasize that this is a review pc. I strongly recommend you disclose that we sent you this machine for review, and I hope you give your honest opinions. Just to make sure there is no misunderstanding of our intentions I’m going to ask that you either give the pc away or send it back when you no longer need it for product reviews.

“No good deed goes unpunished?” How about “Stupid deeds get punished”? By sending bloggers notebooks as a gift and treating them differently from working journalists, Microsoft is implying that bloggers are different in terms of ethics — that bloggers can be bought. That’s an insult.

The conventional wisdom among many tech bloggers is that they’re OK ethically if they simply disclose that Microsoft provided the notebook. The idea is to let readers decide whether to trust what they have to say about it, given all the facts.

Now, regarding blogger ethics. Did you disclose? If you did, you have ethics. If you didn’t, you don’t. It’s that black and white with me.

Did you sell your soul and you disclosed that? Fine. Now it’s up to the readers to decide whether anything you say is worth listening to. But you’re ethical.

Are you trying to hide that you sold your soul? That’s not ethical.

But why would anyone writing seriously about a topic even want to put themselves in that situation? Yes, you can let the crowd decide, but can a serious tech blogger afford to let any readers decide he or she is corrupt? I certainly wouldn’t want to risk that (though no matter how hard you try, some readers are going to think what they want to think).

For example, look at how Arrington talks about what he’s going to do with his notebook, and then what he says about Vista:

I spent about two hours on the machine the other day, testing out the software. Frankly, I’m pretty impressed, and I’m a hard core Mac guy. I really like that the Live widgets sit on the desktop all the time, instead of behind a hot key like they do on Macs, for example.

The only scandal would be in a blogger who received a computer decides to keep it and then writes about Vista in a positive way and doesn’t disclose the situation. Otherwise, there isn’t much of an issue.

I’m not sure what we are going to do with the computer yet. We may give it away on CrunchGear, although our analyst, Nick, has his eye on it as well.

But whatever we do with it, it’s clear that Vista has come a long way since the pre-release betas. It’s a kick ass operating system.

If you happen to be running it on a $4,000 computer, at least.

Arrington subscribes to the you-can-do-what-you-want-so-long-as-you-disclose approach, even going so far as to write about Web 2.0 companies in which he invests, or are run by his friends. As a result, I’ve pretty much written off anything he has to say about emerging companies, and I suspect other potential readers of his site have as well.

I’ll also not pay much attention to what he has to say about Vista, either. Although it’s probably not his intent, his words could be interpreted as: “Now that I’ve got a nifty new notebook that I or one of my employees may or may not keep, Vista’s a kick-ass operating system. Before, it was kind of lame.”

(Arrington used to list his disclosures on TechCrunch’s About page, but they have been removed recently. You can still see them in Google’s cache, however.)

For the record, I’ll be sending the Microsoft-provided notebook back after Vista’s consumer launch. If Microsoft didn’t want it back, it would go to the Chronicle’s Goodfellows charity, where I donate all retail software and non-returnable hardware. Goodfellows sells it — along with books from the book editor — in twice-yearly sales in the Chronicle’s lobby, and the proceeds go to buy toys for disadvantaged children at Christmas. Goodfellows is run by retired Chronicle employees and volunteers, so there’s virtually no overhead.

units and I never accept gifts from companies that I cover. The biggest reason? It’s a major pain in the ass to unbox hardware, get it set up, work with it for a while, wipe the disks and put everything back in its original condition when I’m done, box the pieces back up, and send everything back. I don’t have a lab crew or a shipping department, so I have to do all that scut work myself, and usually it isn’t worth it. If you’re not in this business, you probably think it’s cool to get new stuff all the time. But it’s more of a burden than a blessing, which is why, when I look around this office, I see four desktop PCs, three notebooks, a server, and a slew of gadgets and spare parts, all paid for out of my own pocket. I pay for software, too.

That’s the ideal approach, but Bott doesn’t regularly review specific machines or other hardware components; if he did, he probably would handle this differently. There’s no way an individual or even a big media company has the budget to pay for every piece of hardware that’s reviewed, which is why the current system for technology reviews has evolved.

Does the rise of blogging mean that system must change, and in a way that undercuts credibility? I don’t think so.

One Response

I don’t really care what a blogger’s opinion of a product is. Give me the facts. Give me some screenshots. Let me decide. Tell me what you think, too, but I’ll only take it under advisement if your thoughts are detailed enough that I know they’re genuine.

I’m surprised that anyone that grew up or lived through the days of PC Magazine and other publications who pander to their advertisers would even waste time discussing ethics. Most people are biased in one way or another, anyway. Bloggers in particular have no code of ethics or anything else encouraging them to keep straight. Assume deception and make up your own mind based on the information available. If there’s not enough information, keep looking until you have enough.